Anyone who has restored an old home can tell you no project is as ever simple as you think it will be. Jen and I spent the last 12 years fixing up an 1,100 sqft 1956 pier and beam house in San Marcos, TX. It had been added on to a couple of times, including turning what was once probably a slab patio into an extra room. The little house had great character including original wood floors, probably southern long leaf pine. It had a funky old metal roof and a big 3/4 acre yard. One of the first things I did was add a garden and plant fruit trees. That project went as planned. Few others did.

Twelve years, one half-bath, two tiled bathrooms, one tiled room, one bathroom remodel, one travertine tile shower, one new AC/heatpump and all new ducting, one completely remodeled kitchen with restored pine floors, ten new windows, one two-car garage, new hardiboard siding, one insulated attic and walls, one greenhouse, one 10×20 foot shed and one wooden playscape later, and it’s perfect. So we moved out and started again.

I’m told the Naivar Farm house is probably from the 1800s. Yes, over 100 years old. In that time I know it has been relocated to make way for gravel extraction, multiple rooms have been added, the kitchen moved from the front to the back of the house, a second story was removed (yes, physically removed and the roof lowered), and according to my friend Jeff who knows about such things, it had one of the first styles of electrical system run in domestic buildings (the bare insulators still in the attic attest to it).

No project in this house has gone as I’ve planned it. All of them have had delays, additions, subtractions, advances and retreats. Wiring a 220 receptacle for our dryer took over a week and probably 20 trips under the house. Climbing under the house gets old after about 3 trips. Twenty is torture. And I still have to make one more because I think I dropped my wire strippers down there. Sigh.

But the projects do get completed. I planned and installed a four-strand barbed wire fence with three entrance gates on the front of the property. I think even with four people working on it if took us months. The drier is running; the washer has a new GFCI grounded receptacle. The garden is in; the fig trees are planted. Projects do get completed. They just take longer than you plan. Always.

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